Search This Blog

Posts

I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991of an odd event in my computing career.

===

There's no such thing as bad publicity, the saying goes.Unless, of course, you have no interest in being a public figure.That's where Richard Stallman and I start to diverge.

A friend called early Saturday to report some good news; groggily,I countered with a feeling of impending doom. I had to spend theday preparing for a talk Monday afternoon at MIT. The talk itselfwould be fine: I'd been invited by Butler Lampson to talk about Plan 9at the Lab for Computer Science and took that as the kind of honorI rise to. I'd give a hell of talk, provided I was allowed to.The problem, I said, is that MIT and I are connected by some history.

I explained about The League for Programming Freedom,just the `League' to insiders, whose multiply ambiguous namehearkens to an innocent age in software. Free Software islike Free Love, a hippie pipe dream in whichcomputing i…

Yesterday afternoon was just the right sort of weather for sitting in the park, so towards sunset Renee and I headed down to the little park below us, which has a view across the water and a lovely, long fish pond with a stone bridge across it. The plan was to sit on a bench and watch the light fade, sunset itself being hidden by the hills behind.

Our plan stumbled when we discovered a wedding in progress on the half of the park with the best benches, and then there were sprinkles of rain. We sat on a stone bench by the bridge, sheltered by some trees overhead, and waited for the shower to pass. The violin players in the wedding didn't seem to mind much; they stayed out even as it sprinkled. But the shower soon passed and we moved to a bench at the other end of the park, away from the wedding but still with musical accompaniment. From there, we could look out across the grass and pond and towards the water. The park is small, the pond just a few paces in front of us.